 you have the opportunity to make a million dollars plus. That's it, video is over. Welcome back to the channel, everybody. For those of you who are new around here, my name is Michael, AKA Dr. Chalini, and I'm a board certified diagnostic and interventional radiologist in New Jersey. And that last part of that will come into play in this video. So honestly, the most asked question I get on my channel, I think it's almost on like every single video I talk about. It is, how much money do you make? What is the salary of an interventional radiologist? How much do you interventional radiologists make? How much do you make? Are you rich? All of these kinds of questions people are constantly asking me, which is very strange because all you have to do is brutal how much an interventional radiologist makes and you'll get a salary range. In fact, let's do that now. We will type in how much money do interventional radiologists make? Question mark, enter. Because this seems to be a very difficult task for a lot of people to ask me this question. So based off of this, the middle 57% of interventional radiologists made $187,200 with the top 86% making $454,212. So that's it. Video is over. Realistically though, I think that's a pretty good salary range and for anybody who is interested in interventional radiology and wants to know how much they make, this is a pretty good idea. Now, obviously there's going to be many people who make far more than that. There are even going to be people that make less than that, obviously. That's just the normal bell curve of all salaries. So why am I doing this video in the first place? Is it because so many people have asked me questions about this? No, but it is because I got tagged so many times on this one TikTok video the other day. The TikTok that I'm talking about is from the Salary Transparent Street TikTok account. And if you haven't seen them, put the link up here or maybe over here I'll show you what it looks like. But basically this account goes and asks random people on the street their salary and maybe a little bit about their job or how far into their job they are or what level they are in their career. So people kind of get an idea of what career opportunities are out there and which ones make certain salary ranges. So for starters, I think this whole movement for salary transparency is fantastic because I think for some reason there's a stigma behind talking about your salaries and that's kind of why I wanted to do what I'm doing today. I'm not going to give you my personal salary because one, it varies all the time. And two, I don't want people knowing how much Miami. But I think if I give you a range you can probably tell, give or take somewhere around there that's how most interventional radiologists how much they make. So let's get into this specific TikTok that I keep talking about and that happened to be about an interventional radiologist which is like so random. I mean, there aren't even that many interventional radiologists around. So the fact that this person even found one to interview and asked them how much they make and then they actually told them how much they make, that's impressive. So let's get into it and then we'll talk about the video afterwards. I'm an interventional radiologist if anyone knows what that is, yeah. How much do you make? 350K. How did you get into this? So I went into medical school and in medical school you don't really know exactly what you want to go into but I discovered this field of interventional radiology which I think is the coolest field in medicine. And yeah, I kind of just was lucky enough to come upon it and I love it. I think it is my dream job. What appealed to you about it? So it's a field where you do procedures. Pretty much you're using your hands, your mind, your emotions and you do minimally invasive image-guided procedures. So you can have a lot of impact via a tiny little incision with very minimal, we have complications like any procedural field but I feel like the impact we can make through minimally invasive techniques is just like magic. How's your work-life balance? Luckily I work at a place where work-life balance is great, at least relative to maybe some other medical fields. So and I think the ability to have a work-life balance allows me to bring my entire self into the day which I think is really important for a field like ours. So yeah, I would say I'm lucky enough to work at a place where work-life balance is cherished and that's priceless. Okay, so that was fantastic one. I kept getting tagged in this and I was like, why do people keep tagging me in the salary thing? But that makes perfect sense now. So we have an interventional radiologist, a well-spoken interventional radiologist, might I add. I don't know who this guy is but this is taking place in Boston, Massachusetts and then someone in the comments said that this person works at Penn or in Pennsylvania, I don't know. But I do want to get to these comments because they are kind of funny and it's pretty obvious how little people know about this field. We kept getting a lot of comments about that salary number, 350,000 which is a very large salary for anybody. One person says $350,000? Wow, that's low for interventional radiologists. And that's not necessarily true because there are a lot of factors that go into these salaries and I've kind of done a whole video on academics versus private practice and I'm making a very general statement here that private practice usually makes more than academic interventional radiologists and that's pretty much true across the board for every specialty. But we'll get into that in a little bit. One person says he talks about his job the way I talked about McDonald's. I don't understand that, but whatever. He seems like such a cool guy. I totally agree with that. He's an interventional radiologist so he's already cool to begin with. One person says $350,000 sounds cap. WLB and IR is non-existent. Gotta be much higher or grossly underpaid academic. One people say only $350,000 for IR? Question mark, $350,000 is low for IR in my opinion. I'd be passionate about my field too if I made $350,000. So basically the whole point of reading off some of those comments was to show you that a lot of people were commenting that $350,000 is low for the field of interventional radiology which I guess in some ways it can be but again I wanna reiterate that there are so many factors that go into that salary. And for one he is an excellent ambassador to our field because he clearly has a lot of passion towards our field and likes to promote it and I'm glad that we're getting some good publicity here because not a lot of people know about our field and that's part of the reason why I even started this channel to begin with. Secondly, he mentioned something very important in this video and that is work-life balance. That is something I preach about a ton on my channel because yes, you can go out and make a million dollars, 1.5 million dollars as an interventional radiologist but you are going to be working for it. You are going to be on call a lot. You're going to be working many overnight shifts. You may work a lot of weekends and you will also probably be somewhere in the middle of the United States with not much going on. As a general rule of thumb for most positions the further away you get from a large metropolitan city the more your salary is. That's just like a general rule of thumb. And then a lot of these places in smaller community hospitals need doctors and they're willing to pay doctors a high amount to come work at their hospital because that's how bad they need them. It's just simple supply and demand. So one, yes, you have the opportunity to make a million dollars plus and really there's no ceiling in IR. It just depends on how much you want to work and what work life balance you want. If you want no work life balance then you'll pull a whole bunch of money in. You'll be retired in three years but if you want a work life balance like myself and clearly this guy then your salary is going to be a little lower sort of. And I'll get into that now. The reason being is because in academics the salary is generally lower the vacation is generally lower and the reason is because the work life balance is pretty good. And at the end, these are just general statements. I don't want people in academics coming at me saying we don't have good work life balance or our job isn't easy because I know it's not. Like I know I have tons of friends, tons of interventional ideology buddies that are in academics working in massive IR centers and some of them have really good work life balances some of them do not. So just a general statement here most do but you don't necessarily have to have a good work life balance if you work in academics. I will say though again that in general academics get paid less than private practice. And I've done a whole video on this topic academic versus private practice and you can go watch it up here and link up there if you're interested. In private practice we do have the opportunity to have work life balance as well and that's what I do. We also have different partnership level tracks that you can do if you're in that sort of practice. So say one, two, three, five years or even 10 years at some practices you work as an associate first and then you build on into becoming a partner. If they want you to be a partner if you're a hard worker they want you a part of their practice. You become partner after a few years or so depending on your contract and then you get a piece of the whole pie as a partner just like any company would. Once you make partnership level your ability to earn income goes up significantly and that is the difference between private practice and academics. In private practice your salary can double or even triple after a couple of years of working out of practice in an academic your salary will steadily kind of rise as your academic prestige increases or you become professor, vice chairman, head of the department and whatever. But just because you work in private practice doesn't mean that you have to have a poor work-life balance unless you are working in one of those private practices where you wanna make millions of millions of dollars. Then you're gonna be working hard, very hard. And we're talking wearing lead, sweating all day long bouncing in and out of procedures all day every day. Couple of weekends here, couple of weekends there call overnight all the time probably not in a good area in like someone named a random city in the Midwest in the comments below. That's where you'll be working. But just like this guy in this video I do wanna reiterate that not everybody cares about making a million dollars. And the reason is, is because everybody is in different stages in their lives in different stages in their careers. If I was fresh out of fellowship like I am and didn't have a YouTube career and wasn't married maybe I would like to go somewhere in Nevada and work my butt off and make a whole bunch of money for a few years. But I am married, I enjoy spending time with my wife I enjoy traveling, I enjoy doing YouTube, Instagram, all that kind of stuff. So for me, work-life balance is key. Also for this particular doctor and some of my colleagues they have families they wanna hang out with. So work-life balance is key for them. They don't care if they had to make half or even 25% as much as someone who was busting their butt in Nevada making 1.2 million a year. Work-life balance is for some people with families in different situations work-life balance is worth way more than working hard and getting paid. So that kind of parlays nicely into my next topic which is you should never choose a medical specialty based on the salary. Yes, having a good salary is obviously good but you can't pick a specialty off of salary because you won't enjoy the specialty if you just pick it based off the money. This is why I get a little perturbed when I see so many comments from med students and pre-med students asking me how much I make and if I become a radiologist how much will I make? You shouldn't be thinking of it like that. The goal is to enjoy your work and enjoy your life outside of work if you so choose. The goal is not always to just make as much money as you possibly can. And when I see videos like this, I think it's great for our field because it shows transparency but I also wanna reiterate based on some of these comments that just because he may be making $350,000 and based off our Google search here that's on the lower end of the average salary range for an interventional radiologist that doesn't necessarily mean that he has a bad job or needs to find a job that makes more money. He's clearly perfectly happy at his job because work-life balance is worth way more than all the other stuff. You may not even know. He may be only working like 26 weeks a year because I know plenty of radiologists who worked one week on two weeks off and they still make very good money. You don't know what he's doing. You don't know if he has a whole YouTube career on the side like I do. You don't know if he owns another business and just works part-time. There are so many factors that go into that salary so I just want you to consider all of them and that's why I wanted to make this video. So to summarize this video, yes, interventional radiologists have the opportunity to make a lot of money but not all of them have the desire to. Some people like myself and like this guy would rather enjoy our job and not burn ourselves out because the money is just not worth it. Hopefully this video helped shed some light on the salaries of an interventional radiologist. If you have any questions, leave them in the comments below. I will try to answer all of them because I feel like there are going to be quite a bit of questions about this. Maybe I answered them. Maybe I didn't and I know I'm still going to be getting questions like this in my comments but maybe this will cut down on them just a little bit. As always, make sure you follow me on Instagram and TikTok and as always, I'll see you all on the next video. Bye.